It all depends on what you categorize as an active participant. How many creates does one have to make to be considered active? Create one thing once a month? Is that active? Also a percentage is also dependant upon how many members you have. If you have 3 members and 1 is active then 30% isn't that good.

I don't consider just the people who contribute as active. Those who consume the content are also active. They are using the tool to help them accomplish their goal. In our situation, the tool is used for Ideation as well as Brainstorming, so the act of consuming content is considered active.

By that metric, we have 30% active users. By Kevin's defitiontion, we have somewhere around a 15-20% contrubtion rate. Granted, our community is small, only 1000 users.

1½ month after launch we have 4,5 percent contributing and 17 percent active. But that is out of all the user's in our company, some of who have not been introduced to the system yet. I feel were doing pretty good

If I use the same terminology the last time I looked which was about a month ago for the month we were seeing 15% active, and about 7% contributing. Our community is almost 8 months old and we have roughly 34,000 registered members. One thing I'll say is we had our email notifications break for a few days and activity plumeted so culturally we're not yet at a place where the majority of people naturally are active and contribute.

That's the thing about the notifications. We have a large group of people who turn them off. Mostly our Mac users because they can't create rules in Entourage to filter them to a special folder (like I do). They get inundated with email and so the Jive notifications are the first ones to go.

What we do though is notify all users of a new brainstorm in the system (social group). This helps, but my fear is that we will have to do this longterm. We get great response from that, but we make it nice and visual and pretty so it stands out in the email.

Martin--it is one of the many mysteries of our IT ball of wax. I worked on it hard with our Mac expert who was here and there was a long explanation as to why it couldn't work. I'm hearing that an upgrade of our Macs is coming so I have my fingers crossed....

“Our active participants have shot up about 30%, and around 15% in contributors since I came back from JiveWorld '10. “

Cool! How did you do that? What specific tricks or tips did you learn to increase participation? I’m looking at driving adoption rates for both internal and external communities (yes, I’m also on the “External Community Managers” group!), and would be interested in learning from your success.

We had been running Jive for a bit over a year, and it's really only taken root in the Engineering team and for Social communication (Classifieds, Charity, Events) and I really wanted to see more work being done by the rest of the company.

1) The first thing I did was create a powerpoint presentation that highlighted the business benefits of using social collaboration tools, I picked a lot of information out of the great JiveWorld speaker's presentations and tailored it to my community. Then I sought out key individuals within the company and gave them the presentation. Afterward, I talked to them about their individual needs and tried to identify other groups that they could build Jive Communities around. I held about 10 of these meetings and it really allowed me to see where the collaboration needs were, so far we've launched 3 new communities based off of those discussions.

2) When we originally launched, we called it the "Vocollect Collaboration Center" and made it look pretty identical to the intranet that we were leaving behind which was kind of boring. Over time, people had just ended up calling it "Collab", so that became it's new official name. I designed a logo, new header and changed some gui elements, and launched those changes with our upgrade to SBS 4.5 (we were on 2.5). Then I gave it a tagline "It's on Collab!" which is something you hear people say pretty often around here. I've attached some images below. So the re-launch was pretty epic, and we made sure people knew it.

3) Our company was having a "Fall Festival" event with a chili cookoff, beer, food, games, etc. I set up a "Collab Photo Studio", long story short, I found some great photographers in my company who were happy to help donating their time and equipment, we were even allowed to purchase umbrella flashes and a backdrop for the event. We sent out a "postcard" email (attached) to the company telling them we were taking professional portraits for use on Collab and we also gave everyone a copy of the photo for their personal use. We took about 75 photos that day.

4) I was pulled in to a few company initiatives like "Name that Conference Room" where we solicited ideas from the company on new names for our conference rooms (and a few other things). The "brainstorming" thread had over 2000 views (which is big for us)

5) I put select Collab stats on the home page. Many people feared that if they posted something on Collab, no one would read it. So I published the # of daily unique logins for the week on the home page. It has really helped to dispel that myth.

When you put all of this together, people have really begun to understand what Collab can do both socially and for business. And our stats just keep going up.

I LOVE the Collab no photo photo! Classic! This is a great post - thanks for sharing this. It has many of the elements that are part of the Jive method that our Strategy team uses to drive adoption. Thanks!

Allan--I'll be honest. I'm stealing your idea but calling it my own. OK. Not really, I'lll tell my boss it was yours but the rest of the company will think I'm a genius. It communicates the intent perfectly.

Here's the PSD of the photo if anyone wants to use it. You might want to substitute you own team though, this photo includes a few volunteers from our IT team which is why one guy has a Pitt shirt on and the other a Steelers jersey.

Everyone is free to steal the idea. My background is in web design / development so I'd be nowhere if it weren't for "actively seeking inspiration"

Ted Hopton is the man with our numbers. But one thing I will mention is that I would caution you not to expect your numbers from the first two months to be the same as time goes on. Often, a number of new members will get really active and excited at first, and then activity falls back to a bit lower rate. Or at least that is how it would appear just watching the actual activity stream as it goes. We have just had an influx of new members due to an acquisition, and things are flying fast and furious at the moment in groups and places that had become largely or somewhat inactive.

We had a pilot from January to May. We ended the pilot with around 480 people. We were around 20% of people being active or "content creators" - I personally felt good about that. Then our community started to grow and we now have almost 1600 and our active percentage dropped to 10%. But that is because the number of members grew faster than the number of active content creators.

When active users start to decline as a percentage (and I understand your point about as the population grows - smaller subset percentages can represent a lot of people), I would still focus on knowing how the active users are (and aren't) and start working on new use cases or better socializing existing ones.